Imperial Guard allies

Well, new 40k certainly has me flitting from project to project, all before the last one is finished.  My sisters, chaos, dark eldar and orks all need updating to take advantage of the exciting new 40k rules......

.....and in the case of all except the sisters, actually get me 1,500 points of painted stuff to use on the table!  I was quite ashamed when I realised all those half painted models hanging around armies I thought I could use.....

.....But anyway, who managed to elbow their way rudely to the top of the pile?  Imperial Guard did.  Yep, those chaps who I have about 4k of stuff painted for decided that they wanted more stuff.  So I went with the flow and they are, currently, at the head of the painting queue.

So what was I doing for them?  Tanks?  Nope, I have plenty of those.  More Guardsmen?  Nope, I also have plenty of those. More flyers?  No, I think 2 is quite enough for our little group :)

It's actually a project that I thought about a long time ago, but new 40k has given it a new lease of life.  I'm talking about Inducted Beastmen.  As I'm from the Rogue Trader era, I remember the White Dwarf Guard army list with beastmen squads sent forward armed only with two hand weapons and a bad attitude to duff up the enemies of the Emperor in penance for being filthy mutants.  What fun times they were :) Beastmen then disappeared from the canon in the recent editions unfortunately, but I had decided to convert some up to serve as line guardsmen.  Sadly I just didn't get around to it as they would have just been more of the same line guardsmen that I had already.  So, why did new 40k change things?  Two reasons, the first being the re-emergence of "accepted" stable mutations in the big book which included beastmen and allies.  I had a chance to do the beastmen, make them different from a rules perspective and have them legal.  Perfect :)

So I chose Orks with shootas.  Why?  Because it fits.  I could arm them with lasguns which they blazed away with, buring out the power packs and being wildly inaccurate compared to the disciplined shooting from the line Guardsmen, hence the reduced BS and the fact they have shoota profiles instead of lasgun ones.  They are also tougher than guardsmen and enjoy a fight more, so the profiles worked perfectly.  So, here are the fruits of my labout so far



Fear us!  We come fresh from a number of other projects...

 So, lots of beastmen bodies from a previous army (warhammer doubles circa 2009) and catacan arms and I was away.  As the beastmen figures have their arms swept back, I mostly used the arms holding the gun in one hand where possible, but converted and gree stuffed others when I ran out, as shown below


We have water bottles and nifty pouches

 I also added as  many imperial water bottles, knives and pouches as I could to further add to the Imperial Guard feel of them.

I also then added some brass etch imperial eagles after filing down the eight pointed stars or skulls on their belt buckles

Our belt buckles say we love the emperor

So, next up is painting and the tabletop!  I'm mulling a couple of ideas for the Nob and mandatory HQ you need with allies (most likely a warboss) but I'll add them to the next blog post.